WHY DON'T HEAVY DRINKERS GET FAT FROM EXTRA CALORIES? HERE'S A THEORY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, February 4, 1992                   TAG: 9202040161
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium
WHY DON'T HEAVY DRINKERS GET FAT FROM EXTRA CALORIES? HERE'S A THEORY
The so-called Drinking Man's Diet, a treacherous scheme popular in the 1960s that suggested substituting alcohol for sugars and starches to shed unwanted pounds, was based on the puzzling observation that heavy drinkers and alcoholics often lose weight despite intakes of a thousand or more extra alcohol calories each day.
That observation baffled nutritionists, who long believed that every calorie that entered the stomach could eventually turn itself into fat. Alcohol researchers also wondered why so many alcohol calories could be wasted by the metabolic system.
Now Dr. Charles S. Lieber, a New York physician who has been plumbing the depths of alcohol's many mysteries since 1957, has come up with a biochemical mechanism that he says largely accounts for the remarkable wastage of alcohol calories in heavy drinkers.
Lieber published his findings in the current issue of The Journal of the American Society for Clinical Nutrition under the title, "Perspectives: Do Alcohol Calories Count?"
The answer, he said, is yes and no: yes for a moderate social drinker who has a cocktail before dinner or an occasional glass of wine or a beer. For these people, alcohol calories can indeed add up.
But chronic heavy drinking can prime certain metabolic processes and, in effect, train the body to waste the seven calories a gram that alcohol ordinarily provides.
For example, weight gain was negligible in alcoholics who were given 2,000 calories of alcohol daily on top of the 2,500 calories from foods they consumed to maintain their weight. But when the same number of additional calories were fed as chocolate, a steady weight gain resulted.
Thus, the energy waste associated with a heavy intake of alcohol cannot be attributed to a reduction in the intake of other foods. More likely, it results from interference with the body's ability to derive energy from other foods.
According to Lieber's report, experiments in laboratory animals and in heavy drinkers found that alcohol calories did indeed count for animals and people who consumed a very low-fat diet.
Dr. Lieber, who directs the alcohol research and treatment center at the Bronx Veterans Affairs Medical Center, cautioned that heavy drinkers pay a stiff price for their metabolic inefficiency.
The very process that enables their bodies to dissipate alcohol's calories as useless heat also converts a host of environmental and food-borne substances into chemicals that can seriously injure vital organs.
Some of these chemicals are outright cell poisons, others can initiate cancers, and still others can damage genetic material.
Together these effects largely explain why heavy drinking is associated with a number of life-threatening diseases, including cirrhosis of the liver and cancer of the esophagus, said Lieber.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB